1. Field of the Invention
The present invention generally relates to automated optimization of manufacturing processes and, more particularly, to a method for production and operations scheduling for plate design in the steel industry.
2. Background Description
Steel plants produce a variety of steel products, including heavy rectangular plates. Rectangular plates are used widely in ship-building, among other industries. In modem steel plants, such plates are made-to-order according to customer needs, and thus have different dimensions, thicknesses and quality. An important problem steel manufacturers need to solve is how to efficiently transform molten steel into an order book of rectangular steel plates, given various constraints on the intermediate steel processes and equipment, and waste as little metal as possible.
In the prior art, the steel industry solved the above problem manually, or by ad-hoc computer methods. The drawback of a manual approach is that changes in manufacturing parameters cannot be easily handled, and large order books cannot be handled in an optimal fashion. Existing computer methods which attempt to solve this problem do not produce optimal or near-optimal solutions. This is because they do not systematically explore many different possible solutions but, typically, use heuristics to create a single solution. The existing heuristics are designed with the goal of producing near-optimal solutions but have no way of guaranteeing this outcome. Further, the existing computer methods require a substantial amount of human interaction, and therefore changes in manufacturing parameters cannot be easily handled, and large order books cannot be handled in an optimal fashion. Also the design process is time-consuming because of manual intervention.